sorrow
by Karin Serendipity
Summary: She is the embodiment of love and sorrow, and she is mine. Angst TW: Blood, but not too much.


AN: This is the oldest piece of shit I have and wow, I just wanted to upload it because it had been liked on Tumblr, but since I'm not on there anymore.. have it! Yeah, I haven't kept up with Homestuck, and this is from.. uh, the last place I read was the first (if there is more) ones where you walked around as the characters. When Gamzee/Terezi was announced, yeah.

**_y_**o **u **_r_ e **t** _**h**_e _o_ n **e** t h i _n_ g _i_ w **a** n**_ t _**_thatineverdidhave_.

"Jade? Are you awake…?"

"Jade?"

"Please wake up."

"Please."

"I can't do this without you…"

"This timeline is screwed up to the extreme," she is saying with her swollen bottom lip that has a thin line of blood dripping and sliding from the corner of her mouth and her gums are bleeding and there is blood everywhere, and I caused it.

_Do you need a, uh, napkin?_ But I don't ask her, I'm ashamed of myself and of my hands that are balled into fists at my sides as I walk alongside her, then fall back because the last thing I want to do is see her face.

Her glasses are broken somewhere: the lens shattered and laying in shards on the sand of this fucking island. I think I might have done that too, but I'm not entirely sure and she won't say a word about it with her black eye and her bloody lip. The bruises are appearing in full as the day and night progress and I'm unsure of God, and time, and myself. I'm the Knight of Time… and I'm unsure of it: how it functions, twists and turns, changes, and never is the same.

_Where the fuck was I going to get a napkin?_ I shake my head in just the slightest movement; she captures it, turns her head and I can see the swelling and the dark blue colour of the whole right side of her face and suddenly I'm not who I once was. I am this monster.

"You alright?" Her voice is so soft and light and it floats with the breezes of the warm air and envelopes me; her words wrap around and around me like a shield: like protection. I'm alright, but I'm the farthest thing from alright and I want to shake her for being so stupid. She is asking me if I'm alright and she barely is discernible behind all the bruises.

_No_. "Yup."

Her black hair is still long and flowing though, unharmed, and I want to weave my fingers through the strands; I want to touch and feel and smell. "I'm almost entirely positive that something is wrong here, but I don't know what." Maybe it is that we are aware that this is a doomed timeline, or at least heavily suspect it. She thinks there is just something that isn't right about me and that the air is strange.

John

says

we

are

insane.

He can't remember SBURB and it is only by some miraculous power that Jade remembers; Rose says we are entirely too fucked up in the head. Well, she's a drunk.

"Dave?" she whispers my name like it is a secret that no one else deserves to hear and it glues my feet to the floor and I have lost the ability to move, to breathe, to do anything that isn't immersed around her. I want to place my hands on her gently and I want to kiss her, but instead I incline my head to catch every syllable her mouth utters. "I hurt."

It hurts. I hurt. She hurts. I've hurt her, tainted my hands with her blood. Patches of blue-black are there because of my hands. "I'm sorry."

"I know," and her voice doesn't pick up from the whisper, but her arms close around my neck and suddenly her nose is pressing into my collarbone as she sighs sweetly into my skin. She feels like home and smells like the rain.

She is the embodiment of love and sorrow, and she is mine.

John tries to explain it to me calmly, that Jade just isn't waking up; Rose just drinks to mask her own pain whenever John tries to explain it to her. Jade lays on the bed motionless, but her eyelids must be moving at a rate that we just can't perceive, or maybe her muscles are twitching. I don't remember moving, but suddenly I'm hovering over her and she doesn't have bruises and instead she looks porcelain like a china doll that if touched might crack. She looks fragile, smells sterile: the air is wrong.

Rose tells me that our realities have been so fucked over by this SBURB thing; she swears that it was a program that wiped our memory banks and supplied them with a bunch of alternative realities and that somehow Jade and I were just too willing to accept them. Rose says she had trouble recovering, but she's found something that is an even better memory eraser than SBURB: alcohol.

I didn't even want to play that damn game.

The doctors try to explain it as though we all have some mental disorder; Rose and John got released somehow, but Jade and I are still wearing hospital gowns and nurses still attend to us. We are still in SBURB reality and the doctors tell us it is all in our heads.

I give them Rose's explanation and they tsk at me; they tell me that I shouldn't blame a harmless video game for something that stems from my own head. They are confounded over how we know each other when we come from such different places in the world. John told him that we know him from the Internet, but the doctors suspect that that is yet another thing we imagined.

Jade still doesn't wake up and when Becquerel comes into the hospital and he isn't a dog, my reality shatters into more pieces and I struggle to understand what has happened and how we are seventeen with long limbs. I only remember thirteen; I barely recognize my own brother when he comes in to see me with bags under his eyes. His arms wrap around me and I ask him about my shades and he tells me that he'll buy me a new pair as soon as he leaves the hospital.

He tells me that everything is in my head and if I can just remember school and my friends, that I can come home with him. Apparently this is the only hospital in the world to have treated this phenomenon and it had been years ago.

One morning, she wakes up screaming and the nurses don't rush to her and there are no lights on and I creep over to her bed and find her hand to hold it. She shoots out of bed and buries her face in my neck and cries until the sun begins to rise and when she pulls back she looks at me like I'm a stranger. Her eyes are blank, but grateful and the doctors later report that she just doesn't have any memories.

Then the next couple of nights I wake up to discover her crawling into my bed and curling up against my chest and asking me how she got here and who I was and why did I feel so familiar…?

"Dave…?" her voice is but a whisper now, with all the lights off we are commanded to be quiet and she follows commands because she isn't quite sure of who she is nowadays. I can hear her swallow in the dead silence and the silence stretches on and makes my ears ring as I await her next words, "I hurt." Something in my chest stutters and sighs and perhaps stops, but I can't even worry about that when I'm wrapping my arms around her and trying to envelope her like her words fold over me, but instead I just pull her closer and that causes her to cry harder.

The morning-afters come with doctors and nurses leading Jade back to her bed and looking at me as though I'm suspicious: like I've hurt her, but I haven't this time, I swear to them that she doesn't have bruises. They threaten to put us in different rooms and she screams and her black hair goes flying in each and every way. My knees get weak and I pull the blanket around me tighter, and as soon as the doctors leave, she crawls right back into my arms. I think I love her.

She can't remember SBURB, and she thinks she is getting out of the hospital soon; she thinks that I can get better because I am stronger than her — stronger than anyone, she says. When I open my mouth to tell her that I'm not really sure of how she could have forgotten about SBURB, she kisses me: full-mouthed and beautiful with her lips that whisper words so sweet and her nose slides against mine, sending shivers down my spine. Her hair is mused from being in bed all day and sticks at odd angles and I finally twirl some around my fingers and lose myself in long threads of black hair. She sighs against my lips and presses herself closer with her hand on my shoulder and another on the bed; I use my free hand to cup her cheek and I really do think I love her.

It is sweet irony that I wake up in the morning and forget how I love her.


End file.
